By Ruth A. Sheets
On Thursday, June 29, 2023, the 6 conservatives on our Supreme Court decided they wanted a trip backward into Jim Crow Land, and called “Affirmative Action” unconstitutional. Affirmative Action related to colleges and universities means letting institutions use race as one of the factors in considering an applicant for admission. Of course the 6 conservatives on the Court made up the reasoning for their decision to end affirmative action (except in our military academies). They used the 14th Amendment as the justification, (equal rights and all that). As students of our Constitution, they should know that the 14th Amendment was written to protect and advance the newly freed Black population, not the over-represented white population. Due in part to the Supreme Court’s rulings in the past half century or so, often related to voter suppression, women’s right to abortion, and allowing pollution in areas where Black and other non-white people are concentrated, Black Americans have not come close to reaching anything like the equity Brown v. Board of Education was supposed to usher into our society. Justice is not for all and our Supreme Court conservatives have decided it is OK for them to permit, to even support racial discrimination, while they make up excuses to “justify” it. They certainly do have that excuse thing down.
It is Independence week and I believe it is essential that We the People consider some practices that would not fit in with the dreams our founders had for this nation, even if those founders didn’t realize those things were part of their vision. I am particularly interested in looking at a few in particular.
- 1. Moves in many states are being made to eliminate most curricula and books related to people of color, particularly Black Americans (as well as LGBTQ+ Americans). Florida is the centerpiece of this one, but other states, mostly in the Confederacy, are jumping on board. The states pushing for this discrimination claim those curricula and books make white kids uncomfortable. What!!! little white kids feel uncomfortable? What about the way white kids, their parents, and grandparents did everything they could to keep little Black, Latinx, and other non-white kids from even attending schools with white children, and when the courts said they must attend, those white folks, including many of the children, made life a living hell for those unwanted classmates. Is it possible white kids would be more uncomfortable than that? Some white parents don’t even want their precious little darlings to read about those times. Our current Supremes haven’t had a chance to rule on the book-bannings, but they will and I suspect we all know how they will rule and who will be able to continue their unconstitutional behavior.
2. The SC fearful 6 just said that it is OK to discriminate against LGBTQ+ persons if you have a business, even if that business isn’t real, and if the supposed “clients” are not actually clients, aren’t LGBTQ+, or don’t even know the “plaintiff.” Yep, decide how you want to discriminate, then accept a non-case so you can rule against the LGBTQ+ community on behalf of some nebulous religious claim. Not too democratic, I’d say.
4. The “Freedom Caucus” in the House of Representatives is made up of members who have shown no evidence of wanting freedom or any of the other supposed American values for anyone but themselves and possibly their donors, if they can even think that far. That “caucus” and the Supreme 6 seem to be in sync nearly all the time. Republicans have decided that naming things exactly opposite of what they really are (“Freedom Caucus”) works very well to help in the brainwashing of the Republican electorate. They’re not wrong.
5. Voter suppression is increasing including: gerrymandering; limiting voting places in areas where “Democrats” live; calling fraud every time a Republican candidate doesn’t win (it started with Trump, but now is widely practiced since there were no down sides to Trump’s lying claims, at least not yet; shortening early voting; stopping vote by mail when Republicans learned their constituents were not using it as much as Democrats; the SC gutting one of the most popular laws of the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act, in 2013, the part that required the former Confederacy to report any changes related to voting they planned to make. NOTE: One can know this was about voter suppression because even before the decision came down in 2013, Confederate states already had anti-voting laws ready to go into effect: voter I.D., difficulty in registering, shutting down voting locations in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, changing election rules and who could enforce them, and more.
6. Two weeks ago, the SC got a lot of kudos for a decision they should never have had to make at all. In the case Moore v. Harper, they said that the idea of independent state legislatures was unconstitutional. Of course it was unconstitutional, a bit of nonsense made up out of whole cloth by Republican operatives who wanted to keep red states as red as possible by letting their legislatures decide how the vote would be counted, which votes would count, and that only the electors they chose, not the voters, would be sent to the electoral college. The case should never have even entered any court state or federal, but, Republicans do get many privileges they should not and abuse and expand upon them as often as possible when there are no negative consequences attached.
7. This morning, I read a report on millennials and Gen Z-ers and that they do not consider themselves patriotic. I don’t know if there was a specific definition for “patriotic” given to respondents, but only 38% said they considered themselves patriotic while older respondents had higher percentages. This Independence Day, we need to take this finding seriously. What is the disconnect? How is it our young people don’t trust our government? This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the 1960s we were told not to trust anyone over 30, that is until we turned 30. We saw that point of view presented on TV, in articles, and in movies.
Younger Americans are highly tied to social media and online sources which are filled with misinformation, half-truths, political nonsense, and influencers who can pop online whatever strikes their fancy. That in itself is not a negative because it has opened the world for the online presenters as well as the viewers. The viewers, unlike the presenters, often don’t know what is real and what is fiction, (an act).
There is a lot of politics online that is hard to miss. If a particular YouTuber, for example, spouts a mouthful of anti-democratic nonsense, it might have greater weight than the truth spoken by someone the viewer does not know. There have been a few regulations on social media and other platforms, but nothing permanent. The platforms’ owners have decided to permit whatever their personal biases call for and whatever they are paid by sponsors or investors to allow. I suspect our SC will see a case of some sort related to social media, but until that happens, we are at the mercy of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom are particularly democratic or free of extreme bias and they will use both to promote and manipulate their social media entities. It is likely our SC will go along with the Zuckerberts and Musks no matter what is best for this nation.
So, what can we, at least somewhat patriotic Americans do?
1. First, we must get our
legislators to vote to expand the Supreme Court. It has been done before,
and it’s time. We have a whole lot more people and cases to be heard than
150 years ago.
- 2.
Congress needs to set up a strong code of ethics for ALL federal courts,
containing actual consequences for breaking the code, including removal
from office with ways to remove judges without requiring
impeachment. The founders did not know how many states we would
have, so thought getting 2/3 of the senators to see that a bad justice
needs to be struck from the bench would be reasonable, not nearly
impossible as it is now with our extreme political Senate.
- 3.
We need a crusade to get our senators to see that the Supreme Court is not
functioning with the best interests of the American people in mind and in
their decisions. We need to publicly and often report on their bad
behavior and even bring charges in court. A justice tried and
removed from office might get the others to straighten up.
- 4.
We need term limits for the justices to 18 years tops, then move justices
to lower courts. That way each president will not be able to have
too much influence.
- 5.
There should be a set of standards below which no SC justice nominee can
go: at least 5 years on a lower court; no nominee who has a
significant bias against the rights of Americans in their decisions prior
to the nomination; approval by legal organizations on both sides of the
aisle. That would be a start.
- 6.
Precedents cannot be overturned unless the decision is unanimous or with
only one descent.
- 7.
Book banning is against the first amendment and no state or community
should be able to institute it.
If we are to keep our democracy alive and well in years to come, we are going to have to focus more on our Supreme Court (as well as the lower courts), and start making better selections of whom we want to hear the cases that impact the lives of We, The American People. As things stand , we will not have a strong democracy if we let this current court continue its biased decision-making that is against the rights of so many of us and overturning 50 year and longer precedents for no reason other than their own personal biases. The excuses they use as defense are pathetic and poorly reasoned, but who cares when there is a super majority of justices who are only for rich white pseudo-christian, “straight” men and corporations. That leaves out the vast majority of the American people. That will not work in a democracy, but We the People don’t have to let things continue as they are going.
Happy Independence Day!
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